Chicken 65

A delicious Chinese-Indian dish with a mysterious name.

"Chicken 65" is an Indian dish, stir-fried and spicy, with a yogurt sauce. The dish is relatively new in Indian cuisine, and clearly influenced by Chinese cooking styles.

The origin of the name is in dispute, and perhaps even a mystery. There are many different suggestions that people often relay as fact.

One version: A bunch of soldiers in the Indian army were in a highly-vegetarian part of India, and the menu of a local restaurant didn't advertise that they had meat, so items #64 (mutton) and #65 (chicken) were left unlabeled.

Another version: A hotel in Bombay started serving it in 1965. The same hotel has a chicken 78 and a chicken 82, first introduced in those years.

Another version: It's made with 65 chilis. (This is known to be untrue, however.)

Another version: You're supposed to marinate it for 65 days. (Also untrue: it would go bad.)

And another: A man walked into a Bombay hotel restaurant in 1965 and asked them to prepare the meal, listing all the ingredients and the methods of preparation. The hotel had not heard of the dish before, but agreed to do so, and prepared it. The man had the dish, declared it delicious, and left, without ever identifying himself, and he was never seen again.

In the Occult Underground, more theories abound:

-- The recipe was actually a code. The man who asked for the dish was a spy, and the entire creation of the dish was a communication with someone else in the restaurant. Possibly, he was so surprised that the dish actually turned out good, he declared it delicious by accident, ruining the communication.

-- The number 65 refers not to 1965, but 2065. The herbs of the recipe, and the chickens sacrificed to it, are part of a summoning ritual that will not come to fruition for another 53 years.

-- It's the number of people you have to kill, in the Indian military, before you're allowed to stray from a vegetarian diet. (Known to be untrue, but still circulated.)

-- It's not made from natural chicken at all, but a clone chicken with spice proteins spliced into its DNA. The first 64 iterations inspired death or madness in those who tried to eat them.

-- Chicken 65 isn't the name of the dish. It's the current score. Humans are at 46, losing by 19.

-- It was never made from chicken at all, but from the soldiers of the 65th division of the Indian army, who saw too much. All the spices are to cover up the flavor to alleviate the suspicion, but the dish was so popular with the other soldiers (who didn't get much meat in their diet before that point) that the recipe of the dish became quite popular.

-- 65 is the sum of any row of the magic square of the Indian ape-god Hanuman, general of the vanaras, an ape-like race of forest dwellers. It represents the planet Mars. The dish is designed such that, if you eat enough of it to pass out, you will communicate in a trance with the venaras, who have fled the earth to settle on the dark side of the surface of Mars.

-- The First and Last Man was the one who walked into that hotel and ordered the dish. It's a delicate nudge, intended to direct India toward greater alliance with China, to change the course of history in the next World War.

-- "65" is a mistranslation of "Szekasti Favi" -- a word that, in the secret language of golems, means "Don't eat this."